Still as cis as ever, but I thought I'd show my support by posting an interesting transition metal compound from my lab inventory.
Here's a solution of tantalum chloride in ethanol/methanol, intended for sol-gel deposition of tantalum pentoxide thin films. You spin coat it on a substrate then heat in air; the chlorine swaps with an oxygen in atmospheric water vapor and you get HCl gas evaporating and Ta2O5 on the surface.
@jameshowell We should have a poll about whose fault this is
(my vote: 50% breaking-in-while-already-inside-the-door, 40% git, 10% emacs)
@davidgerard Especially small-to-mid size AI bros seem to love using some extremely gerrymandered definition of "inference cost" (always rapidly going down!) to show that they are "cash-flow positive" (for their 10-20 paying customers, ignoring the 1000-2000 free tier users).
All the other bills in the pile? Softbank promised to foot 'em so they don't count.
@kimcrawley
I hate to say this, but this seems like a pretty good move for OpenAI. Even a mediocre video generator is very expensive to run and likely has little chance of making even minimal revenue. Meanwhile the hype value of video generators has largely worn off, and going forward they'd just be liable for the inevitable deepfake porn and phishing use.
It's all agentic whatever now until we get to the next AI bro scam concept.
@davidgerard
So to summarize state of Firefox AI garbage group policies:
* ESR (140): Preferences whack-a-mole with browser.ml. flags only.
* Current (149): GenerativeAI policy group should deal with the worst bits, but keeping some Preferences browser.ml. bits around may be needed.
* Upcoming (who knows when, hopefully 150-ish): new AIControls policy group looks like it will deal with more outright badness.
Locking extensions.ml.enabled to false is probably still wise.
Looks like Firefox is adding a new group policy item AIControls that directly matches the "AI options" settings page: https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/rev/34fc93ba6c4d8f57cd154677f0c4cd9907fd1339/browser/components/enterprisepolicies/Policies.sys.mjs#114 (this was commited a few days ago and is not yet in the templates)
This will have priority over the existing-and-probably-to-be-deprecated GenerativeAI policy group (FF144), and will hopefully reduce the need for AI-whack-a-mole with Preferences JSON.
FF148 also added a DisableRemoteImprovements item that you might want to think about.
New blog post! I wrote about one of the weirdest CDs in my collection - a CD single with a few lo-fi music videos and the distinct vibes that this is the leftover wreckage of what was supposed to be a much bigger project that never came to pass.
https://cdrom.ca/music/multimedia/2025/07/01/moon-light-cafe.html
Even setting aside the age-verification question, systemd adding user management (userdb) and yet another system bus (varlink) makes it feel like the shark has been jumped.
This is not to say that there are no good parts in the systemd empire, but the parts have become quite numerous and sprawling.
Andrew Zonenberg
Scott Wilson
Misty